Managed Services
Is your computer support company pushing you
into some thing called managed services?
Generally speaking managed services is a system
where you pay a computer support company so much per
month, per desktop PC, per server for support and
certain proactive services. You need to carefully
review what services are included and what
restrictions are stipulated. If you are overwhelmed
and would like a company experienced with the
technical aspects of these agreements to review the
agreement you are being offered you may contact WSI
for a quote on reviewing your agreement. Typically
it requires 1-2 hours per agreement for the review
and to provide you a written summary of the
strengths and weakness of the agreements.
If your computers a run just fine without a
managed services agreement, it may not be right for
you. Although, you'll get a lot of pressure to move
away from what the managed services industry calls
"break-fix", that does not mean it is right for your
business. The "break-fix" model has worked well for
years. With computer equipment dropping in price and
becoming a commodity, it may be more cost effective
to replace a failed computer than to repair it or
pay hefty monthly services charges. New computing
models WSI is beginning to offer including
virtualized desktop and servers, take all the
expensive to maintain technology out of your office.
What you have is simple to maintain terminals and
all the complexity goes into our partner's data
center. Many companies offer virtual desktops and
you may be able to get rid of almost all your
computer headaches for a price similar to a managed
services agreement.
You may also get pressure from your computer
support company telling you that the only way you
can get priority service when you have problems is
by accepting their managed services agreement.
Whenever you start receiving that type of pressure
on any offer, it may be time to look for a new
vendor.
Just because managed services is a popular trend
within the computer support industry does not
necessarily mean it is best for both the vendor of
these services and the customer. Computer support
companies like managed services because they get
paid no matter what. This does incentivize your
computer support vendor to set-up a solid dependable
network for your business. But weren't they supposed
to do that in the first place?
You may also wish to consider a hybrid approach
where you simply buy a scheduled visit from your
computer vendor once a month to come in and make
sure your network is working properly. You can also
maintain a list of small computer problems that
arise during the month for them to resolve during
the visit. This keeps you out of the expensive
managed services agreement, while gaining some of
the benefits of proactive maintenance with some
monitoring.
If you are in the central Iowa area WSI can
directly assist you with your computer needs and
problems. For everyone else we hope this common
sense information is useful whether you choose to
adopt the managed service model or not.